Eurozone inflation continues to rise steadily to 8.6% in June

The annual inflation rate in the euro area was 8.6% in June, compared with 8.1% in May. This figure represents a new all-time high for prices in the euro area, which only a year earlier recorded a rate of 1.9%.

Annual inflation in the European Union reached 9.6% in June, up from 8.8% in May. A year earlier, the rate was only 2.2%, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.

By country, the lowest annual rates were recorded in Malta (6.1%), France (6.5%) and Finland (8.1%), while the highest were in Estonia (22.0%) and Lithuania (20.5%). Spain's inflation rate last month was slightly above the average for both the eurozone and the European Union, at 10%, according to Eurostat.

On the other hand, in June, the largest contribution to the annual inflation rate in the euro area was made by energy (+4.19 percentage points, pp), followed by food, alcohol and tobacco (+1.88 pp), services (+1.42 pp) and non-energy industrial goods (+1.15 pp).

This data is made public in the same week that a new ECB meeting will take place on Thursday, when it will have to decide its next steps in the face of the doubt as to whether the highest monetary authority on the old continent will continue to press the accelerator with rate hikes in order to attack the galloping inflation that accompanies us and follow in the certainly more aggressive footsteps of the US Federal Reserve or, on the contrary, maintain a more conservative tone in the face of the dangers of a recession that has already replaced the announced stagflation in a multitude of forecasts.